AUTOMATED LABELING OF THE HUMAN BRAIN - A PRELIMINARY-REPORT ON THE DEVELOPMENT AND EVALUATION OF A FORWARD-TRANSFORM METHOD

A forward-transform method for retrieving brain labels from the 1988 T alairach Atlas using x-y-z coordinates is presented. A hierarchical vo lume-occupancy labeling scheme was created to simplify the organizatio n of atlas labels using volume and subvolumetric components. Segmentat ion rules were developed to define boundaries that were not given expl icitly in the atlas. The labeling scheme and segmentation rules guided the segmentation and labeling of 160 contiguous regions within the at las. A unique three-dimensional (3-D) database label server called the Talairach Daemon (http://ric.uthscsa.edu/ projects) was developed for serving labels keyed to the Talairach coordinate system. Given an x-y -z Talairach coordinate, a corresponding hierarchical Listing of label s is returned by the server. The accuracy and precision of the forward -transform labeling method is now under evaluation. (C) 1997 Wiley-Lis s, Inc.